Constellation Resarch Webinar "Where You Stand with Siebel" on Sept. 18th

This free 45 minute webinar will discuss what different directions Oracle Siebel professionals can take their Siebel implementation and their careers.

Who: J. Bruce Daley, Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

What: Webinar: "Where Do You Stand With Siebel”

When: Wednesday, September 18, 2013 at 9:30 a.m. US Pacific time

How: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/578393734

Research and advisory firm Constellation Research will hold a Webinar on Where You Stand with Siebel on September 18th. The topic will be the different directions Oracle Siebel customers, partners, and consultants can take their Siebel implementation and their careers.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Siebel technology and as a mature application it shows signs of both robustness and age. With Oracle sending mixed messages about the product’s future, this webinar helps people making a living with Siebel determine exactly where they stand.

"Clearly Siebel technology is not dead and plays an important role in the IT infrastructure of many of our clients" noted R "Ray" Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. "Figuring out exactly where Siebel fits into the mix is challenging. We are pleased to be helping Siebel customers meet this challenge."

The webinar is based on the research paper "The State of Siebel in the 2013 Market: Different Strategies for Moving Siebel Implementations Forward and Assessing Career Risk" that will be published next week by J. Bruce Daley, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.

Daley was, for many years, the publisher of the Siebel Observer, the largest publication covering the CRM pioneer. Widely quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Daley also founded the Enterprise Software Summit.

Bruce's research helps Oracle Siebel customers understand the real position Siebel technology holds in the market, why the conventional wisdom about the product is often wrong, and what the trends driving the misconceptions in the market. The report also offers pragmatic advice for taking different Siebel implementations in different directions and how they will impact different careers. The report will be available on the Constellation website.

Webinar Information

When: Wednesday, September 18, 2013 at:

• 9:30 a.m. US Pacific time
• 10:30 a.m. US Mountain time
• 11:30 a.m. US Central time
• 12:30 a.m. US Eastern time
• 17:30 UK time
• 18:30 Central European time

The Future of Siebel CRM: Community Poll - [Poll close date 24th May 2013]

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of Siebel Systems. After being acquired by Oracle in 2005, Siebel CRM and the successor of Siebel Analytics, Oracle Business Intelligence, are still flagship products. Thousands of IT professionals worldwide make a living from these two systems.

Siebel CRM itself has been on the market for 17 years, and in the Siebel community there is much excitement about Oracle's commitment to strengthen the product's position, for example by delivering the Open UI framework. At the same time, many people wonder how many years Siebel has left.

Always with our fingers on the pulse of the Siebel community, we - a group of dedicated Siebel bloggers* - are working together to conduct a poll to find out public opinion on that question.

If you want to cast your vote on the poll, you can do it right here. Alternatively you can use this link to access the poll in a separate window or on a mobile device.

[POLL CLOSED]


Thanks for your vote
-Ryan

*The following blogs are hosting this poll:
(in alphabetical order)

CRM Conundrum
Impossible Siebel
On Demand Education
Siebel Essentials
Siebel Observer
Siebel Tech Blog
Siebel Unleashed
Wentari



Did we miss your blog from this list? Do you want to participate? Then please contact Alex via twitter or Google+.

[Update]

Its been a good two weeks of polling, the poll has now been closed. Thanks to all who participated. We appreciate your comments. A detailed analysis of the results will be put out shortly.

Siebel Mobile Connected Apps - Side effects of custom toggle applets.

We've been doing some development on the very new Siebel mobile connected apps. The Siebel Mobile app is a huge and exciting addition to Siebel CRM. However, Just like all new products, you can expect some product defects in the initial version of the software.

We will be updating this blog with all the bugs we come accross and their workarounds untill we have a permanent solution from Oracle.

Issue: Side effects of custom toggle applet in Siebel Mobile connected apps.

Here is how you can reproduce the Issue -

Create a toggle applet on a Form Applet to toggle on a particular LOV value. Lets say the LOV toggle Value is 'Retailer'

Issue 1 - (New Record renders the applet in Base Mode)

The applet opens in Base mode when the record context is the value (Retailer) used for the toggle in the list applet. However when you create a new record from other types record, this does not happen.

Issue 2 - (Toggling back from the toggle applet, renders the applet in Base Mode)

After you have selected the Toggle, and the toggle applet is active switch back to another LOV so the original applet loads. The applet switches to Base mode instead of staying on Edit mode.

Issue 3 - (Applet switches to List Applet on New record instead of opening the entry form applet) - Happens only in iPhone Mode
 
Upon creating a new record the applet switches to List mode (without loosing context, which is Ok). You then have to tap on the record again to go to Detail mode to edit/ enter data

Workaround:

The workaround to the above three issues would be to do away with the base mode completely, and have the applet render in Edit Mode at all times. You can do this by simply selecting the Applet Mode to Edit in the View web template items property.

Although, this is not the best approach to have a record editable at all times, especially when using a touch phone/pad. Its the only way that can keep the toggle from not breaking.

Any other workarounds are very welcome!

Cheers!

How to time trigger workflows through command prompt

If you have workflows in your CRM system that are required to be run everyday, but for some reason you are running them manually, this might be a good solution for you to save some time.

This solution demonstrates how you can trigger your Siebel workflows at specific intervals of time on windows. For, Siebel environments on other operating systems, you will have to create a solution similar to this, the only difference being the batch file will have to be written in shell (for Linux/Unix) or the programming language that is supported by the OS.

Step 1 - Write the batch file

Copy the below code in a text file and save it with the .bat extension

::Set Localization
  setlocal
::Gets The Parameters and sets into Environment Variables
   set GTYSRV=%1
   set ENTSRV=%2
   set SIEBSRV=%3
   set SIEBUSR=%4
   set SIEBPWD=%5
  
chdir C:\sia81\siebsrvr\BIN
  
   :: The workflow process name
   set wf=Test Workflow
   set command=run task for comp WfProcMgr with ProcessName='%wf%'
   c:\sia81\siebsrvr\bin\srvrmgr /g %GTYSRV% /e %ENTSRV% /s %SIEBSRV% /u %SIEBUSR% /p %SIEBPWD% /c "%command%"

This will connect to the siebel server via the command prompt and call the "Test Workflow" Workflow process.

Step 2 - Schedule the batch file

The next step would be to schedule the workflow process to run at a certain interval in the day. On windows you will need to schedule this through the Windows task scheduler. On Linux/Unix you will probably have to use crontab.

How to schedule a task in windows

How to schedule a task via Crontab

Note: You will have to add the following parameters in the Add Parameters section each separated by a space.

<ENTSRV> <SIEBSRV> <SIEBUSR> <SIEBPWD>

example: Siebel81G siebelDev siebelDev sadmin sadmin@123

How to Optimize Siebel Application Login Time

Recently, we've had a lot of users complaining about the homepage taking too long to load. Why does the login page take long to load? What happens when the login page loads. Below are some of the tasks that Siebel performs while loading the application.

- Verifying Application Schema Version
- Loading / validating State Models (checks whether or not the expiration date is greater than current date)
- Verifying State Model values for transition
- Loading / Validating Personalization rules and rule sets for each event on applets, Business Components, - - Business services and application
- Loading / validating user profile data.
- Loading / validating System preferences
- Loading localized data (Phone format, date format, time zone, currency etc)
- Loads user reporting hierarchy
- Loads application view-responsibility data.
- Message Broadcast (This can be inactivated by inactivating the Message broadcast bar)

The reason behind such a behavior is that some of the static data (localization, license keys etc) and SRF data that are common to all business components are initialized for the object manager process with the first task or user login request. It is this initialization of tasks that causes the delay in service to the first user.

Setting the “OM - PreLoad SRF Data” (PreloadSRF) parameter to TRUE will trigger the loading of this global data for the object manager process when it is initialized upon starting the services. Now the first login should be faster as the burden of reading the static data is pushed to the component startup phase.

NOTE:  After setting the parameter to TRUE, you must recycle the services for the parameter value to take effect.

If setting the parameter at the enterprise level, all the object managers in the environment will automatically inherit the parameter value (unless an administrator has specifically set the value on the lower object manager level).

Also, if this parameter is set to be TRUE in conjunction with the MinMTServers parameter, the static data will be loaded for the number of object manager processes specified for the MinMTServers parameter when the component is initialized. This way there will be no delay in service for a large volume of users since the minimum required multi threaded object manager processes would already be initialized.

M.O.S Reference:  Doc ID - 476878.1

How to Create a Parent with Multi Child Tabs on Aggregate Views

As the quote goes, "You cannot NOT have a user experience". User experience is one of the most important things in product design. I personally feel that Siebel's User Interface could be a lot better than what it is (but thanks to the new Innovation pack for 2012, with the Open UI I think Siebel is getting there).

Most users do not like drilling down on a record which then takes them to the detail view of a record and then navigating back to the parent record. What they usually ask for is, if they could have the tabs right on the main view of the screen. Something like this -

 

Some thought this was not possible but actually it is and requires just a web template change for the Aggregate views.

Change the Web Template of the view to either one of the following -

1. View Parent Multi Child With Tabs

2. View Parent List With Tabs

Cheers!

Generate Quote using Narrative Reports in CRM On Demand

Hey Guys,

One thing we all think about is how to design a simple solution to a complicated requirement and so today lets see how to create a Narrative report for a 1:M relation. As you may know Narrative Report can be used only on one record. But, using a combination of reports, we can do the a LOT more!

All we need to do is create 2 reports linked to each other and add them to a Dashboard. let me show you how.

Step 1: Create a Opportunity Parent Report

Using Opportunities Subject Area (Reporting  or Real-Time) Add the fields you would like to use on the Opportunity Information Section of the Quote report.

In Step 2: Create Layout, Add a Narrative View and use the this code
Opportunity Parent Narrative View Code. Make sure you use the @"Number" symbol in the right places, or the values would display against the wrong columns.

You'll notice that the values are not correct in this preview, don't worry. since this report is not being filtered from the Prompt yet, the right values do not appear.

Save the report

Step 2:  Create a Opportunity Product Report

Using Opportunity Product Revenues Subject Area (Reporting  or Real-Time) Add the fields you would like to use on the Product List.
Note that I am filtering the contents of this report based on the results of the Opportunity Parent Report.
In Step 2: Create Layout, Add a Table or Pivot Table (Whichever works for you) and a Narrative View and use the this code Opportunity Parent Product Narrative View Code.

You'll notice that the values are not correct in this preview, don't worry. since this report is not being filtered from the parent yet, the right values do not appear.

OK. Save the Report.

Step 3: Create a Dashboard

Create a New Dashboard and give it a name. In the Design Section add both the above reports.

Save the Dashboard.

Step 4: Create a Web Link (Last Step)

Create a Web Link on  Opportunity and in the URL text area, add the link to your Dashboard you created in Step 3. You can get the URL by Viewing the Source Code

Ex: https://secure-ausomxxxx.crmondemand.com/OnDemand/user/analytics/saw.dll?Dashboard&PortalPath=%2fshared%2fCompany_XXXXX_Shared_Folder%2f_portal%
2fOpportunityQuote+Report&Options=rfd&Action=Navigate&P0=1&P1=eq&P2=Opportunity%2E%22Opportunity%20ID%22&P3=%%%Id%%%

The %%%Id%%% will dynamically change on clicking the Web-Link from your Opportunity Detail Page and display the Opportunity and Opportunity Product Information on your Quote Report


Make sure you test the URL by Adding a Opportunity ID and running the URL in your browser.

After creating the Web-Link, add it onto your Opportunity Layout.


Finally: Let's see how this report works in reality.

Goto any Opportunity that has at least One Product associated

Now click the "Generate Quote" link that you added. You should now see your Opportunity and Opportunity Product Information in a beautifully formatted Quote Report.

Now, it's time for you to go and impress your customers!

If you have any questions about the post, feel free to add your comments!

Cheers!
Ryan